Category: Politics

Which newspaper to read?

Which paper to read? Does it even matter these days when so much news is online, and we can switch (firewalls permitting) at will, and link to sites and sources around the world.

Let’s assume it does, for some of us anyway.

Compassion and a natural liberal instinct dictate the Guardian but I’m almost too much at home there. I am from Manchester after all. As it’s too easy for the opposite reason to read the Daily Mail: every article makes the hackles rise, apoplexy only just contained.

But I must be objective…

Middle ground, campaigning on key issues … maybe the Independent. Neo-liberal, small state… the Telegraph or Mail. Respectable, establishment, with several fine columnists… The Times.  But The Times is the tame face of Murdoch,  the not so fantastic  Mr Fox.

Social welfare, social justice, yes, we need a big state, and a spending state. And yet, the welfare budget is too big, and benefits can act as a big disincentive to finding work. I accept both arguments. And so…

Read everything, or dip into everything. Try the Huffington Post online. Specialise a little and read Foreign Policy magazine. Go weekly and read the New Statesman, the Spectator or the Economist. Read The Week and be bombarded from every point of view.

Be brave and watch Fox TV. Restore your faith in humanity and watch Jon Stewart’s The Daily Show. Try out salon.com   My true colours show I’m afraid – but don’t dismiss the arguments of the other side. Avoid easy answers. Capitalism and compassion can and must exist side by side.

Follow the middle way, as the Buddha taught.  Wisdom does not inhabit the extremes, it seeks to balance them.

Read often, read widely, read wisely. That is the zenpolitics way.

Israel and Palestine

I’m white, Anglo-Saxon, pro-Israel, pro-Palestine, and bitterly opposed to Israel’s actions in Gaza.

I’ve been pro-Israel since I was 8 or 9 years old, and first read of the fight to establish the modern state of Israel. Some of my best friends at school were Jewish, my father’s friends likewise, the finest teachers I ever had (postgraduate work at the Warburg Institute) were Jewish (Aby Warburg was Jewish), my best friend in book publishing was Jewish. The remarkable world of early 20th century Vienna, with Mahler and Freud prominent, was one of the great intellectual and cultural moments in history. My professor at the Warburg, Ernst Gombrich (also a Jew from Vienna), suggested my PhD subject might be the Jewish ghetto in Venice. Visiting Cordoba many years ago and seeing the bust there of Maimonides was a reminder of that remarkable Jewish culture that shared cultural supremacy with Islam back in the 12th century. And I could go on.

As for the bible (the Old Testament as Christians know it), for me it is the most remarkable and inspiring record of any people in history.

Opposing Israel’s relentless attacks on Gaza is not anti-semitism. It is the reverse. I’m passionate about Israel. I wanted to work on a kibbutz when I was in my 20s. But other angry, intolerant and and often fundamentalist forces have taken government in Israel in another direction. There is talk of ‘deligitimising’ the Israeli state. My fear for Israel is that if they continue on their current path that may in many eyes be just what happens.

Talk of double strandards – why oppose Israel when violence elsewhere is as bad or worse – is wide of the mark. Israel was in its early days a society predicated on Western values of tolerance, individual freedom and natural justice. It is its departure from those values, and its massive devaluing of each Palestinian life compared to an Israeli one, which may yet undermine it.

Back in the 1930s there were those who argued that Jew and Arab, already fighting each other at a local level, could still live side by side. I’ll mention Martin Buber, an early hero of mine, in another post. They imagined then a worst-case scenario but could they ever have anticipated the current reality?

America is not united in its support for Israeli actions. Liberal Judaism is more critical, the 18-25 age range opposed, but the old consensus still holds sway, and Hilary Clinton’s loading of blame on to the Palestinians in Gaza doesn’t bode well for sanity in post-Obama American policy.

A two-state solution need not be far away. But there are powerful forces arguing against it, for whom repression is the only answer. How it will work out in time I doubt even if God knows.

The perils of intervention

Just one word this morning – intervention.

When to intervene and when not to? The right (and it’s true, not only the right) would have us intervene in Syria, as we did in Libya, but not, for America at least, in Gaza, where the intervention is already happening, and longstanding. But the USA doesn’t have proxies in other parts of the world. The reverse is true. Intervention couldn’t be by subtle diplomatic means, in the current state of things, so it would again be by bludgeon.

And when did bludgeon last work? Melanie Phillips, way off-beam as so often, describes the West as being ‘rudderless’ and ‘leaderless’, and blames Obama for no longer being prepared to defend Western interests. What are Western interests? Can we win favour by more violence? Can we import democracy into countries unwilling to accept it, and unable to define it as we do? Even Turkey – what of Turkish democracy reinterpreted by Erdogan?

What chance intervention working had it happened in Syria in 2011? Fragmentation and violence as is now the fate of Libya would have been the likely outcome. The same result as non-intervention. But that’s another story, and I wouldn’t want to oversimplify it by anything I write here.

As for intervening by way of wider sanctions in Ukraine, they have a poor history. When applied against Saddam Hussein they were riddled with holes. Against Iran in recent years they have put big pressure on the economy, and arguably had an impact. But Russia isn’t Iraq or Iran, and Putin knows it. He’s recently been, after the shooting down of MH17, in Latin America, signing deals. Likewise recently (before MH17 ) with the Chinese. The Russian economy may suffer from sanctions the West imposes but he has too many friends elsewhere for sanctions to have a chance of bringing him down, or even changing his policy.

I’m not opposed to sanctions per se, but I doubt the efficacy of further sanctions. They will polarise, drive both sides further part, they will not advance a solution.

Charles Krauthammer (National Review), in the context of Ukraine: ‘History doesn’t act autonomously. It needs agency.’ Responsible leaders, he argues, have a duty to try and shorten the time span of dictators. ‘History inevitably sees to the defeat of their [the dictators’] malign policies.’ But does it, and if it does, what replaces them? Misplaced agency is a fool’s errand. Follow Krauthammer and you’ll follow more of such errands.

Obama is playing a longer and wiser and braver game. It requires patience, and a determination to work with local people, local agencies, local parties. Think Pakistan, where we can all understand American policy toward the Pakistani Taliban, but the great majority of Pakistanis view America as the great satan. World opinion outside of the West is weighted against America. Obama is trying to readjust that balance. It will be a long game, and there are and will be shrill and foolish voices crying against it.

The appalling violence of the jihadists in northern Iraq is a mighty challenge to that policy. Stopping that violence is a necessary intervention, and it could have come sooner. But, beyond that, Obama’s aim is to work with and support the Iraqi and Kurdish goverments and military.  Reclaiming territory must be handled by local and not American forces.

Where we might intervene, and with success, is in Gaza. Intervention would be to stop violence, engineer peace, seek a two-state solution, but with Israel a proxy for the USA, what chance is there of that?

 

 

 

 

 

‘Not some sort of illuminati lizard creature’

… this being what, in Russell Brand’s view, Barrack Obama is not. But it is, in his view, how Judge Jeanine on Fox News would have us perceive him.

Russell Brand lost my vote when he ranted on about democracy in his TV discussion with Jeremy Paxman, but he’s clawed back my favour with his online TV show, The Trews, to which my kids (very grown-up kids) have alerted me.

Check out ‘Is Fox News More Dangerous Than Isis’ on YouTube. His interlocutions are brilliant. He sums up: ‘That attitude [Fox News] is more dangerous than ISIS.’

He feels a little sorry for Obama and the flak he’s receiving, and that’s where the crazy ‘not some sort of illuminati lizard creature’ comment comes in.

We need Russell Brand, as we need Jon Stewart.

Farmageddon – the evils of factory farming

I attended the Farmageddon event organised by the charity Compassion in World Farming (CWF) at the Royal Geographical Society yesterday, 12th July, with my daughter. It focused on the evils of factory farming….

Around 65 billion animals reared globally every year, they argue, most of whom spend their lives in conditions which are confined and cruel.

[For info on the extraordinary Farmageddon book see end of this post.]

CWF has real achievements it can be proud of over the last 45 years: ending the use of veal crates, battery cages for egg-laying hens, the close confinement of pregnant sows. They’ve also been instrumental in persuading the EU to consider animals as ‘sentient beings’, so the idea that animals don’t have feelings and so can’t suffer cruelty has been consigned to the wilder crueller corners of the human psyche.

But has it? Maybe in Europe, or in western Europe, and among some people, but what of factory farming USA, with its vast mega-dairies.

Animals are taken off the land and confined, and the land is given over to growing the food that feeds them, or to cash crops, while the grain that feeds them is imported. An irrational and crazy system. It allows animal farming to be carried out on a vast scale, but the grain loses much of its nutritional value converted into cattle feed. And the farms generate a vast amount of toxic waste. Proximity to mega-dairies is no place to be. In addition keeping animals in unhygienic conditions requires the use of vast quantities of antibiotics, radically increasing the chances that infections becoming antibiotic-resistant, in humans as well as animals. Witness David Cameron’s concerns about the development of drug-resistant superbugs early this week.

Issues:

Mapping out the food chain. Tracing the path from the emptying of the land and the construction of mega-dairies, piggeries and chicken farms, to our supermarkets and tables, and demonstrate where the diseconomies appear, and the damage the system does to animals, to humans (not least by pollution) and the environment.

Lining up with other charities, including environment and development charities, focusing on the implications of a big-company, corporatist, factory-based approach for poverty, pollution and the environment.

How can a charity combat the muscle, marketing, mega-bucks and self-promotion of big farming companies, for whom an animal is simply a unit of production?

Politics… CWF is considered to be political by the TV companies so it can’t advertise. How can it get its message across? Raising public consciousness has always been central to its work, but then as now it cannot be propagandist. It has to allow both sides of the picture to be presented, the factory owner and the dairy cow, and let the public makes up their own mind, as they did in previous campaigns over veal crates. We have to be thankful for TV programmes like Countryfile, which will talk to traditional dairy farmers – but also a farmer planning a more factory-based approach, but nothing on the scale (yet) of the USA.

Mega-dairies in the UK. We came so close to having our own mega-dairy at Nocton in Lincolnshire. [See http://www.countryfile.com/news/news-plans-lincolnshire-mega-dairy-withdrawn] The outcry was intense, and the application was rejected. What of the future – can we be sure that similar mega-businesses won’t get planning permission in other parts of our green and pleasant land?

But… it’s one thing to take on British and European farmers. To take on American agri-business is something else. Vast sums of money, a deep-rooted lack of sympathy for animals and the environment, bred in from the days of the early settlers, and now with a big-money expression, where once it was settlers fighting for their livelihoods.

How to get supermarkets on board? There are regular conversations, forums where the issues are discussed, but it’s only public opinion that will really drives changes, as they did after ‘Horsegate’ last year. And how do we get the wider public involved, so they bring their influence to bear on farmers, and the politicians who could legislate? The public would rather not know about the farms or abattoirs.

What of education? CWF sends speakers into schools, but even in geography lessons factory farming itself isn’t major focus. Today’s kids are very much aware of the environment and recycling. The arguments are presented in a non-controversial way. In the case of factory farming, the CWF can’t engage in propaganda. It has to present the arguments and let students decide. Climate change is a similar issue in this respect. Good economic arguments and powerful science maybe should carry the day. But vested interests insist they be listened to, and in that, protest as we may, CWF and all supporters have to acquiesce.

Food waste and cheap offers on food. Both need to be outlawed, by supermarkets and in the public mind. If costs employing traditional methods are higher, then better we reduce our meat consumption and make up for the reduction by wise consumption of fruit and veg. Easy to say but…

Poverty is a major issue, cheap food keeps people alive, so how do we address these issues without impacting on the diet and welfare of the poorest amongst us? That’s a balance we have always to keep in mind.

And, thinking crops, Monsanto genetically modify grains, and drought-resistant strains might, for example, bring areas of the Sahel into production. But the seed would be supplied by the seed companies, and farmers would be tied to the company seed, and in time big companies would buy them out. Monopoly rules again.

Don’t let being a vegetarian or vegan cloud the argument. That’s not what Compassion is about. It is not opposed to meat-eating, but the lives and deaths of animals need to be humane. Animals must be allowed to live as nature intended them, ruminate or snuffle, and die, as our position higher up the food chain has always dictated (that is a brute fact of life) – but by the civilised humane methods that characterise modern society at its best.

Compassion… it is Compassion in World Farming. We are focusing on animals as well as human beings. We are all sentient beings. Compassion for animals can’t be a substitute for compassion for humans. It’s an attitude to the world – our world. Meeting the people from CWF was impressive. They aren’t as I saw them an angry charity (though anger has its place) – they are passionate.

THE BOOK Farmageddon: Farmageddon: The True Cost of Cheap Meat, by Philip Lymbery (CDEO CWF) with Isabel Oakeshott, Bloomsbury, £12.99.

 

IPCC report – understanding the evidence

A letter to the Economist about the recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report encourages us to see climate models not as ‘a prediction machine’ but as ‘living maps, drawn up by scientists with the most recent evidence available…’

It’s the phrase ‘living maps’ I like. Wouldn’t it be great if policy discussions generally could use living maps, mapping out options and actions and consequences, with full context, and a decent attempt at impartiality?

The press would hate it, and so too the politicians. Maybe I would too, to be honest. Democracy as we know it is all about confrontations. But a few occasional living maps are useful, so well done the IPCC.

And, yes, the IPCC is impartial. Errant reporting of the movements of Himalayan glaciers doesn’t vitiate reams of irrefutable evidence. How we respond is a different matter: are consequences manageable, how much does it matter if they’re not, what on balance is best for the world? But we need to accept the evidence before we can have that debate. Increasingly acidified oceans and retreating ice sheets and, yes, glaciers, are there to remind us.

We need those living maps, to work out our options. There are different routes to take and we may get lost. Routes we can argue. But we’re mad to challenge the contours. When the deluge comes we don’t want to find ourselves in a river valley all the while claiming the mountains don’t exist.

Data geeks rule OK

Buzzards mew (see last post) and data geeks buzzz….

The Economist’s Lexington column talks about the surfeit of data and data geeks buzzing around Washington DC. Data it seems is the truth, or truths, because data can be made to say a lot of things, depending on which way you twist it. Unless you’re Nate Silver, who wishes to be judged on his outcomes. That would and should be the real test for data geeks.

CP Scott: ‘facts are sacred, opinion is free.’ But if facts are merely data then – is nothing sacred?

‘Washington’s passion…for data does not signal the start of a new Socratic age, in which political classes jointly search for truth.’ (Lexington) Each of us brings his or her own ‘tribal instinct’ to weighing the facts. So maybe that’s another rider to CP Scott’s dictum. Keep your tribal instincts in check, and when judging facts put your mind in neutral…

Over here we’ve had the Civitas report, arguing there has been no insider advantage from joining the Common Market all those years ago. Our trade with the EU represents no greater percentage than it did in 1973. The government’s response: ‘the EU’s share of UK trade has remained consistent because of the huge growth in other markets in the same period.’ Now I’d need to re-read Richard Lambert’s article in Prospect a few months back, check out the recent CBI report arguing a different case from Civitas, and the Civitas report itself. Then form my own view. My tribal instinct backs the CBI. Civitas are a right-of-centre think tank, so we’d expect their instinct to be more critical of the EU. Surprise surprise, that’s just what they are.

Damned hard being neutral, and a whole lot less fun.

Banning books – a prison library story

For anyone with any involvement is book publishing, and anyone with a sense of the redemptive power of books, the government’s recently introduced changes to the IEP (Incentives and Earned Privileges) scheme for prisoners cause alarm bells to ring.

Anyone who tampers with the availability of books risks evoking thoughts of Savonarola in Florence in 1505, or Fahrenheit 451. But you don’t need to burn books. You just place them off-limits.

The changes claim to be ‘about making (prisoners) work towards their rehabilitation. Poor behaviour and refusal to engage in the prison regime will result in a loss of privileges.’ One key change:

‘A ban on all sentenced prisoners receiving parcels including books and other basic items, except for a one-off parcel at the start of their sentence and in exceptional circumstances.’ Television access is severely restricted. (The issue is not of course restriction itself – it’s how tight that restriction is. There are good reasons for restricting TV access.)

To progress IEP status, prisoners must ‘demonstrate a commitment towards their rehabilitation’ by engaging in purposeful activity, behaving well and helping other prisoners’. It seems that ‘knitting wool, embroidery silks as well as books are banned and indeed the parcel is returned to the sender who has to pay’. (Again, wool implies needles, and you can see why needles are restricted – if not outright banned.)

The effect would seem to be to make purposeful activity harder. The changes appear to run directly counter to both rehabilitation, by helping prisoners stay connected to the outside world, and better re-connect when they get out, and to their personal welfare. You build confidence and self-esteem, you don’t undermine it by denying opportunities for self-improvement.

Reading the Prison Reform Trust’s document ‘Prison Without Purpose’ is disturbing. Compounding matters is the failure of many prisons to comply with the statutory duty of prisons to have a library, with all prisoners allowed access for a minimum of thirty minutes every two weeks. Book stock, points out the Society of Authors, ‘in many prisons is poor, often damaged or out-of-date and that inter-library loan requests are often slow or not actioned at all.’

Note: existing regulations allow access for a minimum of thirty minutes every two weeks. That is bad in itself.

Humanity and compassion are at the heart of what I write about in this blog. On the evidence I’m aware of (from the PRT’s report, the book publishing trade press and the wider press) the current changes runs counter to both.

The dry bones of a thousand empires

Also from the Mark Twain quote:

(Damascus) has looked upon the dry bones of a thousand empires, and will see the tombs of a thousand more before she dies.

When we talk of being part of a Christian tradition, we do need to widen that to encompass Judaic, Greek, Roman, Arab. Talk of a thousand empires may be a little exaggerated … but our spiritual and cultural traditions have been nurtured and fashioned over many millennia, and they’ve come down to us interpreted and recreated through (for the UK) a fifteen-hundred-year Christian history. When we try and conjure value systems without that spiritual content we are doing simply that – conjuring. Belief is one thing, faith is another, they can be disavowed, but to disavow our Christian tradition, to imagine that our values have simply an evolutionary explanation, is to deny history. I italicise simply. Scientific and cultural evolution work together. The former doesn’t have the conceptual framework remotely to encompass the latter, any more than the latter can explain the former (not that anti-evolution and intelligent design protagonists haven’t tried).

To get back to Damascus – ‘will see the tombs of a thousand more before she dies’. Thing long, think in terms of centuries, even millennia. Every generation thinks it has solutions, and every generation comes up short. Put the rights of man and democracy in that context: if there is a promised land it will not come out a eureka democratic moment, it will evolve over historic time.

For Syria, as for all of us.

 

Collaborative commons – a new era dawns?

Are we about to enter a new post-capitalist era?

A few thoughts on the ‘zero marginal cost society’, after hearing Jeremy Rifkin speak at the RSA London, 29th April.

Jeremy Rifkin argues that the zero-marginal-cost era is almost upon us, where there will be no longer any significant extra cost in bringing a product or service to market. No marginal cost means no profit, and there are some big implications there!

It will be the era of ‘collaborative commons’ (a hefty term), with social media blazing the trail. The next stage will be an internet of things when we can create what we want online – create our own apps, develop our own private algorithms, and more. We’ll not only communicate online, we’ll make our journeys in driverless cars, depend on green energy. Beyond that we’ll 3D print our own products: the first printed car (do I believe it?) is already on the roads. All American schools are to have their own 3D printers. Our natural instinct to share will be reborn, already have been in social media. We’ll share cars, find rooms to stay through community websites, children will realise that toys are not to be possessed but to be played with for a while, and then passed on. (Have the children been told?) The millennial generation, under thirty, already have a different more collaborative mindset. And this is only the beginning.

Rifkin is not arguing a political case, not is he anti-capitalist. This he argues is a development even Karl Marx failed to foresee, though Keynes with his concept of technology replacement came close in 1930.

Rifkin was asked at the RCA talk why was that people in the UK still thought in terms of the old categories of private, state and charity. With the millennial generation Rifkin believes that that will change. But I’d argue that as of now there’s no new paradigm, collaborative commons isn’t remotely part of the language or understanding. And without a big idea which people connect to, sharing as an economic driver will be much harder to establish.

Rifkin senses the change is inevitable. It doesn’t need protagonists. It will happen. In a collaborative world future generations will naturally revert to a sharing paradigm. They may not know it. But… without protagonists change will be much easier to resist. The music industry was swamped by free downloads before it knew what was happening. We’re all much wiser now.

Everyday products and services will inevitably be cheaper. Businesses will make less money. Pay lower wages. If we can 3D print and costs come tumbling, industries will go under. Rifkin argues there will be a long transition period. But could the result still be economic collapse? Will we be able to afford mortgages? To argue that in a collaborative world we will be sharing property rather misses the point. We may all, without explicitly realising it, decide it’s better to stay with inequitable old world A rather than leap of a cliff hoping that we’ll parachute happily into a promised collaborative land. I predict a hard landing. Or maybe we won’t even jump.